Digital asset management (DAM) generally refers to a business process or a software tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution and archiving of digital assets. Specifically, digital asset management may involve the creation of an archive, the development of an infrastructure to preserve and manage digital assets and a search functionality that allows end users to identify, locate and retrieve digital assets.
At its simplest, a digital asset management system may simply involve a set of database records. Each of such database record may represent a digital asset and may contain information about that digital asset. As an example, a database record may contain the name and format of an image file, the date the image file was created, the name of the person who created the image file, and so on. In some cases, the database record may include additional information such as the content of the image file.
While digital media management technologies were once used exclusively by publishing and media companies, they are increasingly being incorporated into content management systems to manage other digital assets such as photos, music, videos, animations, podcasts and other multimedia content. These technological advances continue to bring challenges to business operations management. Consequently, there is always room for innovations and improvements.